INDIA. Mumbai: The Barsu village at Rajapur in Ratnagiri, Maharashtra, has been on the boil for the last few days due to the opposition from the local people to the proposed Rs 3.5 lakh crore oil refinery project to be set up on the 13000-acre land.
The local people, aided by political parties, have been staging agitations in the last few days, claiming that the project would destroy the ecology of the Konkan region and upend their way of life. They have been opposing the land survey on the grounds that the toxic emissions from the refinery would destroy their orchids and paddy fields and badly affect the ecological balance.
The project, a joint venture between Indian Oil Corporation Ltd., Bharat Petroleum Corporation Ltd., Hindustan Petroleum Corporation Ltd., Saudi Arabia-owned Aramco, and the UAE’s National Oil Company, was earlier planned in the neighbouring village of Nanar. It was scrapped in 2019 after locals protested, deeming it detrimental to the environment. Now it has come back after four years, two kilometres away in the Barsu-Salgaon area, and has been termed a “green project”.
On January 12, 2022, then Chief Minister Uddhav Thackeray wrote to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, suggesting that the state government can make 1,300 acres of land and another 2,144 acres of land available for the refinery at Barsu. He also mentioned that there are no human settlements or trees on 90 percent of this land.
However, now Thackeray has claimed that the letter was written under pressure from the Central Government. He has maintained that the government should seek the opinion of the local populace and that the refinery project cannot be imposed upon them. NCP Chief Sharad Pawar has also expressed a similar opinion.
The Congress has been maintaining a measured silence. Surprisingly, Shiv Sena (UBT) MLA Rajan Salvi from Rajapur has supported the project. However, “Swabhimani Paksha” leader Raju Shetty has opposed the project.
The project would have become the largest single-location refinery complex in the world, with a capacity of 60 million tonnes. It would open a vista of jobs for the unemployed.
Shiv Sena MP (UBT) Vinayak Raut and others were arrested on charges of defying prohibitory orders. However, now the administration has dropped the charges of using criminal force (section 353 IPC) by the protestors against public servants. The women protesters have already been discharged.
The government is also planning to send a delegation to Thackeray to reach a consensus for the project. The government has also announced to inquire into allegations that the landlords who procured the land near the project in a hurry at cheaper rates earlier were planning to sell it at a heavy price to the government when the land acquisition process begins.
But, and large, the agitation seems to be more an attempt to derive political mileage rather than the state’s welfare. Because when the Vedanta-Foxconn semi-conductor project (Rs 1.54 lakh crore) and the Tata Airbus C-295 manufacturing project (Rs 22,000 crore) were shifted to neighbouring Gujarat, the Opposition parties had decried losing prestigious deals.
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